February roundup

Monthly things

Hello friends! Before we get to the roundup, I’m announcing a BRIEF pause.

Between work, house projects, doing our taxes, the news, some personal stuff, and of course the puppy (more below!!!), February absolutely kicked my ass and March is following suit. I’m low on brain power (it took 5 days just to put this post together) and I need a little time to recharge. Paid subs will be paused until I’m confident I can be back on a regular schedule, probably a couple months.

ICYMI, my only other post in February: how to relax.

Reading

Books

For the first time in maybe my entire life I didn’t finish a single book this month…yikes! I started a handful and put them all down bc they either weren’t for me or bc they definitely are for me but I wasn’t in the right headspace. I told you, February kicked my ass. But I did finally put up bookshelves in my office, nearly a year after we moved in.¹

Gonna add a 4th shelf and get a cozy chair / different lamp / that print won’t stay there. Suddenly feeling self conscious about my books! Most of what I’ve read over the past 5 years was from the library or donated when we moved, so what’s left feels very millennial-english-major, which…can’t fight who you are, I guess.

Also I think I need to delete the Substack app from my phone lol, I’ve become fully addicted. But on the other hand…I’m reading lots of great stuff, everyone was absolutely firing this month (as evidenced by the extensive list below).

Articles, essays, blogs

• This cute profile of Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song by

  Hunter Harris

• Lessons at the end of the world by Hanif Abdurraqib. Nothing is permanent here, or anywhere, but today the picture has its place, and I hope I can say the same tomorrow.

  • Also this artist drawing houses lost in the LA fires.

• Will the art world go post-woke? by Ben Davis. Expect a lot of bitter, fractured, irresolvable arguments. It’s going to be that way until the institutions stop failing, which means until we have a better politics.

• Chopstick Sleeves as Emissaries of Japanese Typography and Culture.

• On the sanctity of touch by

  Cole Haddon
  . We do not touch anymore except to hug hello and goodbye, though I cannot explain why, and this once ubiquitous gesture in my life — now excruciatingly alien — makes me feel both confused and uncomfortable.

• Debased + Exalted part I and part II by

  Michelle Santiago Cortés
  . Why can’t we accept that it is possible to know something in the sobriety of our thinking mind and in the heat of our living body?

• SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 71 by

  Meaghan Garvey
  . I could say that before I became Jung-pilled, it was Twin Peaks which re-established the role of myth in navigating the great mysteries of life.

  • Pair with Between silence and scream by

    terry nguyen
    . This “new” era is simply a cataclysmic continuation of the old ways of being. What will it take to wrench us from its deadening grip, to stir us towards something akin to action?

• Onion man, onion man by

  Cameron Steele
  . When you’re here, you can even listen to the process of a sorry old heart, let its throbbing portion in an unexpected cage⁸ change the structure of your reality (death is not what you thought it was.)

• How to survive a trade war by

  Rachdele
  . Economic resilience starts with the idea that you know what to be resilient towards.

• On slogans by

  Inigo Laguda
  . Resistance requires the activity of confronting injustice, it requires a spiritual voltage that’ll grant its inhabitants the courage to look snarling beasts in the face while fear quakes in their chest and so I believe slogans balancing equations such as rest as resistance are a pacifiers.

• Who does the future belong to? by

  Michael Rance
  . I would like if we immediately cultivated a culture of friction, tension, strong disagreements, and struggle. Because Christ almighty, will we need it.

• Time for a little anarchy by

  Patrick Nathan
  . Social media is exemplary of how a leftist slogan or aesthetic can become a fascist tool, weakening solidarity and driving people who should be working together into vastly different camps.

• Banish with laughter by

  Sarah Lyons
  . The paradox here is that in order to have the boundary destroying empathy that connects you with something outside yourself, you actually have to put boundaries around some things and designate them as sacred.

• Giving up — on intellectual life after academia by

  Petya K. Grady
  . You can think of giving up as terminal disillusionment but if you do, you should also consider the opposite end of that spectrum – giving up as enlightening disillusionment, which brings with it the questions and the possibility, of a future.

• Taking your time is the point by

  Haley E.D. Houseman
  . Community does always not form in the ways you expect, but the raw materials of persistence and labor and care are unmistakable

Whew! Still with me? Ok on to the rest. But first, a little puppy:

Introducing Margie

Watching

• We got to see Alien on the big screen and it was incredible.

• Fallen. What is Denzel doing in this movie?

• To Live and Die in LA. Some really interesting and beautiful shots, obvi, but the myth of this paired with the inability to find it anywhere for so long was too much for me, I was left feeling underwhelmed. William Petersen was terrrrrrible.

• Good Night, and Good Luck. Solid little flick.

• Flow. I feel a little heartless not being as moved by this as everyone else seems to be but I still enjoyed it. I woke up the next day wanting to play MYST.

• The Dark Knight. I can’t help it, I still love this movie.

• Road to Perdition. I love when they let Jude Law be a creepy little freak.

• Yellowjackets. Idk why I resisted watching this but now I’m almost through season 1. Great casting between teen/adult characters.

• Severance. This is tickling the long dormant LOST regions of my brain.

Listening

Music

Exhibit B of “February kicked my ass” — I completely abandoned my deep listening project. Didn’t even think about it until I came to do this roundup. I’ll get back on course this month bc I really do want to cultivate this practice.

In the meantime, I’ve been diving into some of the playlists from

Herb Sundays

.

Podcasts

• Real Life Ghost Stories I feel like I hit the jackpot with this. Years worth of episodes of ~true~ spooky stories and (as far as I can tell, I’m still deep in the backlog) it has yet to veer into the mode that so many of these podcasts do, where it just becomes stories about women having scary, non-supernatural experiences due to men being creeps. A miracle!

• Nada Surf on Broken Record a nice dose of nostalgia.

• anarcho-tradwives a really great conversation between

  Raechel Anne Jolie
  ,
  Margaret Killjoy
  , and Hazel Acacia. Pairs well with
  Alicia Kennedy
  ‘s piece On Tradwives.

Surfing

• My Life in Weeks and the accompanying Wait But Why post.

Bits and bobs

One of the main culprits for the mayhem this month: Margie!!! It took Otis a couple weeks to realize what a win this is for him, but he’s fully on board now. Also we finally got some good Indian food (had to go to Seattle to find it, but I almost wept at those first bites, it’s been too long).

Alright my friends, that’s all I got this month. You’ll be hearing from me again soon but right now lil Marge needs near constant attention and what kind of monster would I be to deny her??

Until next time, take care of yourselves.

<3 Cat

1. In my defense, it took so long because I first had to patch two small holes in the dry wall. Understandably, it took 10 months to muster up the willpower to do that.